Documents show Ring tells police how to get user engagement... and user footage.

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Hundreds of police departments around the country have partnerships with Amazon's home surveillance brand Ring. The relationship benefits both sides: the company provides tech and software to law enforcement, and the cops both provide data to Amazon and also help sell the product to local homeowners. That alone raises troubling issues, but according to a pair of new reports, Ring also gets access to real-time 911 data, and the company helps police work around a need for search warrants when looking for footage.

Gizmodo reported late last week that Ring is tapping directly into real-time 911 dispatch data, which it then uses to "curate" crime news for its Neighbors app.

Ring confirmed to Gizmodo that, in many jurisdictions, it has access to computer-aided dispatch (CAD) data from the emergency response systems their law enforcement partners use. It uses an API call to pull in the address or GPS coordinates of a call, the incident time, and a description of the incident.

Further Reading

Only certain incidents qualify as newsy enough to get pushed to Neighbors as crimes: burglaries, vehicle break-ins or theft, shots fired or shootings, stabbings, hostages taken, and arson. Other forms of assault, theft of things that aren't cars, missing persons, rape, crashes, school evacuations, school lockdowns, threats, and dozens of other categories of crime do not make the cut.

The company also uses CAD data to push public safety alerts to Neighbors related to residential, commercial, and structural fires and explosions.

When Ring receives that data, it then has an "in-house news team" review and reformat the call information before pushing it as an "alert" to app users within a certain radius. As part of that review, the news team scrubs personally identifying data, such as exact address, from the report, the company told Gizmodo.

Watching your “Neighbors”

The Neighbors app is basically your local Nextdoor group on steroids: it generates a map of your local area, then populates it with crime reports and occasionally footage from neighbors' Ring cameras. Theoretically, the information makes a homeowner feel more secure—but given the categories of data Ring pushes to the app and the frequency with which Ring cameras flag false alarms, it may just foster a sense of paranoia for many users.

The police who partner with Ring also have an app. The law enforcement portal tells cops how many Ring cameras there are in a given area, then lets them request access to users' footage from a certain timeframe.

A company representative told Ars after the last time we ran a story about Ring that the company "facilitates" requests by police. "User consent," said the representative, "is required in order for any footage or information to be shared with law enforcement." Ring also said that police are not able to see "any information related to how many Ring users received a request, who declined to share, or which users opted out of future requests."

But there seems to be a big, fat workaround. Vice Motherboard obtained documents showing that Ring advises law enforcement on how to "persuade" users to give up footage.

Engagement is “awesome!”

It's all about engagement, apparently. Motherboard found that Ring coaches police to be proactive on Neighbors to reach out, make connections, post alerts, and otherwise interact. "That will be critical in increasing the opt-in rate," Ring told one police department. "The more users you have, the more useful the information you can collect."

"Seems like you wasted no time sending out your video Request out to Ring users, which is awesome!" another Ring representative told another department.

And for those recalcitrant few, for whom no amount of social buy-in is enough, there's an end-run: police also have the option to ask Amazon directly for Ring footage if a user declines, effectively generating a subpoena.

The Fresno County (California) Sheriff's Office told Government Technology that, while most users "play ball," for the ones who don't, "If we ask within 60 days of the recording and as long as it’s been uploaded to the cloud, then Ring can take it out of the cloud and send it to us legally so that we can use it as part of our investigation."

The officer who spoke to us also dismissed the potential for user privacy concerns. "The consumer knows what they're getting into... If you're a good upstanding person who is doing things lawfully, nobody has concerns," the officer told GovTech.

We've asked Ring for a response and will update when we hear back.

UPDATE 5:55pm ET: After we published our story, a representative from Ring responded to our request for comment to deny all allegations in the Government Technology report.

"The reports that police can obtain any video from a Ring doorbell within 60 days is false," a spokesperson said. "Ring will not release customer information in response to government demands without a valid and binding legal demand properly served on us. Ring objects to overbroad or otherwise inappropriate demands as a matter of course. We are working with the Fresno County Sheriff's Office to ensure this is understood."

I am a good upstanding citizen and I have nothing to hide. Also because I'm a good upstanding citizen the cops should have to jump through a thousand fucking hoops to invade my privacy, instead of just logging into every damn camera in the neighborhood.

Apple has announced a line of competing products. In the announcement they said, the users data would be stored locally and encrypted. They also said, they would not have the key. In the words of Apple CEO Tim Cook, "Privacy is a human right."

I’m not clear, is the footage for anybody with a Ring product or those with the Neighbors app? The former is fairly significant (if they can support the Wiki listed 1300 employees), the latter who knows.

For what it's worth, I believe Blink cameras (also owned by Amazon) have a similar relationship. At least - after I bought and installed two new Blink cameras, I was asked to install the Neighbors app. It seems to me Neighbors is the portal by which law enforcement has access to footage. I hope it's not otherwise.

As a former LEO I can absolutely see how this would be an amazing crime fighting tool. However, I am fully against companies like this throwing people's information around like confetti. And the fact that Amazon gets access to 911 data? Really!? I just don't know anymore.

I thought that was only supposed to apply when the "product" was free, e.g. Google Search, Facebook etc. Fuck this "we'll sell you stuff and then sell your info" making money on both ends bullshit. I'm so glad I'm not an early adopter and I can read about the horrible things that happen before I buy some things.

So if I live very close to a neighbor has a Ring doorbell which is oriented to surveil my house 24/7, what keeps me from directing a very low power NIR laser at their Ring camera to disable the surveillance?

I thought that was only supposed to apply when the "product" was free, e.g. Google Search, Facebook etc. Fuck this "we'll sell you stuff and then sell your info" making money on both ends bullshit. I'm so glad I'm not an early adopter and I can read about the horrible things that happen before I buy some things.

If I understand this correctly, Ring users are "voluntarily" building out a giant mass surveillance network.

Quote:

"User consent," said the representative, "is required in order for any footage or information to be shared with law enforcement."

I don't have a Ring device, but is this opt-in or is it opt-out by default. Or worse, is "user consent" basically acceptance of the TOS?

actually I would love to know the sales numbers on these things. if it breaks a million I might be surprised.

Somebody is pitching these things to home builders. We have been looking at new homes in Colorado and several builders have installed them (the house we eventually purchased did not). The Realtor wasn't sure why they were more common than before but agreed she has been seeing them more and more.

Lots of people, perhaps those of the Facebook persuasion, don't see much of a downside to these issues.

I'd ask you to get off my lawn if we actually had one (it's xeriscaped).

The officer who spoke to us also dismissed the potential for user privacy concerns. "The consumer knows what they're getting into... If you're a good upstanding person who is doing things lawfully, nobody has concerns," the officer told GovTech.

There it is. There's the fuck-off-little-person-we-know-best attitude from law enforcement.

And in spite of his response there, I bet the officer who spoke doesn't like wearing his body camera and feels like it gets in between him and dispensing "justice."